1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a presence-based interactive communications system, and in particular, to routing communications sessions to a presentity from a watcher based on watcher priority information, presentity presence information and presentity preference information.
2. Description of Related Art
Presence-based interactive communication services facilitate more efficient and effective communication sessions by enabling callees (presentities) to publish, in real time, their presence information (such as, the availability, activity, local time, location, current status of the active devices/applications, etc.) and their preference information (e.g., device preferences) to callers (presence watchers). The presence and preference information improves the efficiency of establishing many different types of communication sessions, such as “Click-to-Talk” for real-time voice, “Click-to-Text” for real-time text, “Click-to-MM” for real-time multi-media (video+) and “Click-to-Conferencing” with a particular real-time media type (e.g., voice, text or multi-media).
However, in today's society, presentities typically have multiple devices registered to a network. For example, the current release of Microsoft® Live Communications Server® supports a maximum of 64 devices registered to the server per presentity, and the real-time states of all these devices can be distributed to the presence watchers. Since each device may be capable of running multiple applications, a watcher may have difficulty determining the preferred device and/or preferred application for each media type. Currently, presence systems only allow a presentity to indicate their preferred device, regardless of the real-time state of the presentity's devices or the exact media capabilities of each device. Therefore, based on the current preference information, a watcher may initiate a communication session to the presentity's preferred device, even though that preferred device may not be the device preferred by the presentity for the particular media type.
Moreover, the presentity is currently not able to control which devices a watcher can initiate a communication session towards, which may reduce the presentity's communication and privacy satisfaction. For example, a presentity may want to limit the devices available to the watcher for communication sessions according to different authorities or priorities granted to the watcher by the presentity. Thus, depending upon the importance of the watcher to the presentity or the category of the watcher, the presentity may want to allow the watcher to initiate communication sessions to different presentity devices. As an example, the presentity may want to allow only important watchers, such as the presentity's boss or an important customer, to initiate communication sessions with the presentity's cell phone to reduce cell phone charges. However, current presence systems do not allow a presentity to provide different available devices to different watchers.
Therefore, what is needed is a presence system for allowing a presentity to indicate device/application preferences per media type and to indicate watcher priorities for presentity devices. In addition, what is needed is a communication system and method for routing communications sessions to a presentity from a watcher based on watcher priority information and media type device preference information.